March 2007

March 31, 2007

One thing about Henry VIII: Not only was he a womanizing glutton, his story has commanded a slew of fiction and non-fiction in books and films. His 6 wives are remembered in the ditty: Divorced Beheaded Died/ Divorced Beheaded Survived. I cannot think of a more documented English king, or one whose corpulent image is more indelible. Played by Jonathan RhysMeyers in a new miniseries for Showtime, The Tudors, to premiere this Sunday, he is now lank and lean, his lust near pathological. When was the last time you heard the words in flagrante delicto on television?

At a screening hosted by the magazine Marie Claire, the star told a story about working onWoody Allen's Match Point, imitating the nasal New Yorkese of the famed reclusive director. Between takes, thumbing through a catalogue, he came upon a resort in Patagonia, high atop a hill, secluded, serene. He told Woody he'd be going there after the shoot. Woody looked at the photos politely and said, "That's my worst nightmare. I would never leave the room."

In portraying Henry, Rhys Meyers said, "My life was none of my business." Impressed with his intellect, the actor relished the role of a monarch who spoke five languages and wrote music. That, however, is the off-screen Henry VIII.

Forget the fowl and mutton. I can still see him, his linens loose, licking the ankles of his wife's hand maid.

March 30, 2007

Artist Judy Chicago is having a New York comeback. You can tell by her blast of curls, red-rimmed eyeglasses and sequined sweaters, the petite and feisty artist has an eye for the decorative. This week she is feted at The Brooklyn Museum; her historically resonant work, “The Dinner Party” (1974-79), first exhibited here in 2002 will now have a permanent home. The conceit of this landmark epic-scale installation is that 39 women in history from all periods—ie. fertility goddesses to Hatshtepsut, a 15th century B.C. pharaoh, to the lyric poet Sappho, to Georgia O’Keeffe have a place at the table of high culture, each setting hand-worked with plates cast in ceramics for that figure. Victorian era poet Emily Dickinson would dine on pink lace; for Virginia Woolf the plate sprouts odd dimensional forms. Beneath the table another 999 women are named in gold on a ceramic tiled floor. For a view of the work’s evolution, studies for “The Dinner Party” are exhibited at the ACA Gallery in Chelsea. An excellent, state-of-the-art biography, Becoming Judy Chicago by Gail Levin (Harmony Books), deftly limns the story of this artist nee Judy Cohen.

For women of a certain age who know the before and after of the ‘70’s era of feminism, “The Dinner Party” still thrills. What fascinates is the response of the young, who, while admiring the conception and execution, find the work dated. Hard to fathom, this frustrating view can only come after the hard-won toils of an earlier generation; harder to explain is how in our culture of privilege the victories for women remain vulnerable. More edgy is the work in “Global Feminisms;” each of the 50 artists exhibited is born after 1960, displaying work from countries where the plight of women is not so fortunate. Identity issues abound. A woman seated in a pin-up girl pose wears a Musim prayer hat. A tattooed figure nurses a baby a la traditional mother and child. A photo commemorates Sylvia Plath’s suicide; sprawled face down in a ‘50’s kitchen, she lies beside the open oven. A video of an opera from Poland, “Il Castrato,” has drag queens witness the dismembering of another’s latex codpiece. In another, looped clips from familiar Hollywood movies illustrate an arc in male/female relations, moving from romance to physical abuse to murder. You simply cannot contest the entertainment value.

March 25, 2007

The writer Paul Austeris obsessed with the fount of creativity: some books investigate the magic, or how the trick is done. Often, as in Oracle Night, the protagonist is a writer writing. In his new movie, his second now opening the New Directors New Films series at Lincoln Centerand MOMA—the muse herself is given form. She is Irene Jacob (famed muse of Polish director Kieslowski) playing the ethereal Claire Martin who shows up in bed alongside the fiction writer/Auster alter ego, played with great charm by David Thewlis. As the film is called The Inner Life of Martin Frost, the story is as surreal as inner lives go—the personal projected, literally. From the opening pan of framed family photos atop the mantelpiece, portraits of Auster, his wife the writer Siri Hustvedt, and their daughter Sophie signal the subject of Auster’s inquiry. You cannot get closer to home.

You have to love a film that shows writers as important. The idea is as antiquated as Frost’s portable typewriter in a world of laptops, and oddly out of place when characters call on cell phones. Disbelief suspended, you follow the lovers’ discourse on aesthetics, on what is or isn’t real, on Hume and Kant. Up to the plot point where Martin burns the 37 pages of his newly written story to keep Claire alive, a Tinkerbell a la Hawthorne concept, the film’s surprises sustain interest. Something fizzles when the lovers separate and speak from different sides of a door, when Martin blindfolded, is permitted to see Claire only in mirrors. A mysterious “they” seems to be the problem. Doubling the writer/muse motif is the handyman who happens to write and his niece (the Soprano’s Michael Imperioliand Sophie Auster).The story becomes as jumbled and inexplicable as inner lives go. The final frame follows the car winding down a country road, Martin happily driving with the vision of Claire in his rear view. One hears Sophie Auster’s lovely voice singing “Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day.” One thinks of the 1993 movie of Auster’s book, The Music of Chance, directed by Philip Haas, when the writer appears in a cameo driving off down a country road.

In an informal poll I have learned that among favorite novelists, Paul Auster is #2 (after Kurt Vonnegut).At Thursday’s screening of “Martin Frost,” many fans clutched first editions for Auster to sign. Surrounded by his muses, Irene, Sophie, and Siri, the author obliged.

March 20, 2007

The Hamptons are sometimes evoked in distain: snarled traffic on the LIE, McMansions by the shore, Mom'n Pop shops morphed to Gaps and Starbucks, Main Street cloned to Rodeo Drive. Those privileged enough to frequent Long Island's East End know that much has changed in the name of progress. And yet, much remains of the beauty and charm that originally lured writers and artists to the lush landscape and potato fields. Last night at the annual awards dinner, honorees and presenters alike remarked at one last bastion of old Hamptons: Guild Hall. A premiere arts institution, Guild Hall honored sculptor John Chamberlain for the visual arts, architecture critic for The New Yorker Paul Goldbergerfor literary arts, actor Mercedes Ruehl for performing arts and Roy Furmanfor lifetime achievement in philanthropy. Emceed by writer Marshall Brickman, the event at the Rainbow Room was its usual love fest attended by Arne and Milly Glimcher, Marc Glimcher and Andrea Bundonis, Michael and Ninah Lynne, Patti Kenner and her 95 year old dad, Gail Sheehy, Jill Furman, a producer of the hit musical The Drowsy Chaperone, now producingIn the Heights. As always her mother Frieda kvelled as Hannah Pakula chatted with Chuck Close whose wheel chair stood up on its hind wheels so he could converse at eye level.

Brickman, a former owner of a Stanford White "Association" house on de Forest in Montauk conjured the memory of an emcee of yore, Peter Stone, famous for his "7-minute Louvre," a fly-through glimpse of Mona Lisa, Winged Victory and Venus de Milo, as well as inventively choreographed routes to the Hamptons involving signposts akin to driving through someone's living room in Manorville. Overhead, images of previous honorees flashed: Wendy Wasserstein, George Plimpton among them. Overcome by nostalgia, I dove into my lobster salad, filet mignon, and flourless chocolate soufflé so warm it was runny. Josh Gladstone, Artistic Director, told me that he is making the EH/New York City run twice a week: his 6½ year old son August is performing in Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia (2nd part) at Lincoln Center. Josh also told me that the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival so sorely missed last summer is renegotiating its Montauk site. Mercedes Ruehl, Academy Award winner for "The Fisher King" was also lauded for her work in "Married to the Mob." Last summer she brilliantly evoked Frida Kahlo at Bay Street Theatre in a play that was first staged as a reading at Guild Hall. A Sag Harbor resident, she is currently looking at a play about Louise Nevelson the playwright Edward Albeegave her. Taking the stage, she spoke about the "ghosts" at Guild Hall, legendary figures on the John Drew Theater stage (i.e. Helen Hayes, Bert Lahr, Thornton Wilder) whose spirits yearn for fewer commercial cabaret and circus acts to fill the seats, and a return to its origins as a playhouse. As Mercedes put it, for drama to return as the main course instead of a side dish.

March 15, 2007

A photographer in The Valet, Francis Veber’snew film is perhaps the only villain in this hilarious movie that will open in April, if such a comedy about a cheating, prominent husband Pierre Lavasseur (Daniel Auteuil) can be said to have one. Catnip for the paparazzi, he is captured on the street with his beautiful model mistress Elena (Alice Taglioni). We see her on the runway featuring a cameo by designer Karl Lagerfeld. Fearing divorce, Lavasseur must now convince his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) that another man, a passerby, is really Elena’s boyfriend. The escalading deception implicates a hapless young man, a parking attendant, in love with a young woman, the daughter of a prominent doctor above his social class.

Veber is a master at comedy, evidenced in his films The Dinner Game and The Closet, but mostly in person. A part-time resident of Los Angeles, he is tanned and tailored. I asked about the brilliant casting of Kristin Scott Thomas who in this film and in Guillaume Canet’s thrilling "Tell No One" speaks impeccable French. Veber laughed stating that he got her in a moment of vulnerability, when she was divorcing her husband, a prominent gynecologist.

Of course if you are King Lear, played expertly obstinate and vulnerable by Kevin Kline in a revival at The Public Theater, you want daughters who fawn on you as you dole out the real estate. This excellent production also features the sons of Glouchester, another wrong-headed father, with Timothy D. Stickney as maddened Edgar and a commanding and “hot” Logan Marshall-Green as the conniving Edmund. The greedy, sycophantic sisters (Angela Pierce and Laura Odeh) swoon in his arms; the women, unfortunately fade in comparison to the fine men, particularly Cordelia (Kristen Bush), the honest and “true” child who returning as a warrior should, in the best of all possible plays, have more presence. The staging, all clanging ramparts and metal over sandy floors, especially in the stormy denouement where Lear accompanied by his Fool sees the light, is simply awesome. In an after-show discussion the actors revealed: the ground is actually pulverized cork and not dangerous to anyone’s health; the magic of onstage eye gouging remains a secret. The squeamish beware.

But if you really want to know what men want, check out Andre Aciman’s first novel, Call Me By Your Name (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). In conversation with Colm Toibinat The New York Public Librarylast week, the writer, known for his memoirs, Out of Egypt and False Papers, seemed surprised at the openly gay author’s praise of his most heated prose—and the invention of some sex acts. Whatever anyone says, the Proustian influenced Aciman knows all is in the desire:

“I longed to touch his knees and wrists when they glistened in the sun... loved how his white tennis shorts seemed perpetually stained by the color of clay... that his billowy blue shirt promised to harbor a scent of skin and sweat that made me hard just thinking of it.”

March 10, 2007

The Rendez-Vous wraps up with a meditation on the Freudian paradigm: what do women want? With apologies to the doctor and to that grand gap-toothed Chaucerian dame, I must ask, is it only French men who really care? On these shores the question is for television women, a conceit for Carrie Bradshaw, fodder for Desperate Housewives. But look at Flaubert and his Emma, why does the story end in tragedy?

In a post-feminist era, it doesn’t have to, but that resolution eases neither pain—nor the intensity of pleasure.

At a luncheon celebrating the French movie directors at the restaurant Bette in Chelsea, I ran into Benoit Jacquotwhose new film (opening in late spring) The Untouchable, is about an actress in Paris who travels to India in search of her father. (Now there’s a Freudian pursuit!) The film’s debut in New York seems to dovetail with an interest in things Indian at large, evidenced at ABC Carpet featuring programs in yoga and meditation amidst the commerce of colorful silks, and the opening of Mira Nair’s excellent movie of the popular novel The Namesake, about immigrants from her country to Queens. While Nair’s India focuses on the details of family rituals, an insider’s view, Benoit’s India embodies a mystery map of psychic interiors, an outsider’s attempt to penetrate its “heart of darkness.” The name Untouchable of course refers to a caste in India’s rigid social hierarchy, and serves as a metaphor for an emotional state. As in his last film, A Toute Suite, also starring the luminous Isild Le Besco, Jacquot images the inner journey in terms of travel, in that movie’s case, Tangier.

Regina: I have a fantasy that you make you make your films dependent on the most exotic locations--where you want to go.

Benoit:No just the opposite. I choose the woman and then see what journey we can make together. It was Isild last time and this. In my new film it is Isabelle Huppert.

Regina: What is it like working with her?

Benoit: We made five films together. We don’t have to talk. In France we say, we are cousin/cousine.

Regina:So what is the new movie about?

Benoit: A woman sees something and knows she must change her life immediately and totally. Men don’t understand this aspect of women. They don’t want to understand it.

Regina:Yes for women that is a daily occurrence. Does the woman suffer or embrace it?

Benoit:She suffers but she knows she must do it--leave everything behind.

Regina: So where does the journey take her—and us?

Benoit: She journeys north through Belgium and then to Germany and eventually she goes down to Ischia, one of the most beautiful places in the world.

March 09, 2007

In this year’s Rendez-vous with French cinema, life sounds something like this: haunting and evocative, the down journey of Edith Piaf, her sickly thin skin juxtaposed with her richly trilling voice, sets the tone for La Vie en Rose. The miracle of Marion Cotillard’s performance as Piaf, France’s Judy Garland, is already generating major award buzz. The actress morphs from curmudgeonly teen with wild black curls to a crone in orange fright wig. In either case Cotillard herself is unrecognizable. On opening night, a white stretch limo expelled a joyful party at the Time Warner Building and we rode up together in the elevator to the Café Grey. Not till she was pointed out at the bar could I tell that one was the film’s star and still I had to scrutinize to see how this lovely looking tall young woman could contort her expression, hunch her shoulders to be the waiflike, aging Piaf (the name means sparrow.) In fact Marion Cotillard is mignon in the manner of Audrey Tautou in her Amelie days before Hollywood ambitiously cast her in The Da Vinci Code. The French keep it real. On that special night, Cotillard was styled by a guy in her group: dark curls pinned up, a youthful careless do to go with her casual jeans. No glitz. No gown.

"You must have known a great deal about Edith Piaf, she’s such an icon, a national treasure,” I said, knowing that along with the graves of the poet Apollinaire, playwright Oscar Wilde, and The Doors’ Jim Morrison, Piaf’s in Paris’ Pere Lachaise cemetery is a popular tourist destination. “Not really,” replied Cotillard, “I just knew a song or two.” Well, she mouths the original’s lyrics with great drama and authority.

Gerard Depardieu in a supporting role is a posh nightclub owner who gives Piaf her first break. In The Singer, this most versatile actor takes center stage playing a self-effacing near has-been on the French lounge singing circuit. Already somewhat nudged out by karaoke, once king to the lonely and sentimental, he watches his fame dwindle with wise resignation. Depardieu, paunch in tow, shows another side of his enormous talent: The man can sing. You simply cannot not love him. He meets a young and mysterious single mother played by Cecile de France, the actress who caught everyone’s attention in Avenue Montaigne. You know how they will end up. You say, so what. Play it again.

In the riveting The Page Turner, sweet but frightening revenge is enacted to the tinkling of classical music on ivory keys. A young piano student loses her scholarship and dream career because of a concert diva’s flip disregard. Years later we see who is dependent on whom. If you are going to get back, go all the way. No chance to replay.